snare in which the greatest souls
allow themselves to be caught,--that a man covered with favors has
difficulty in setting himself against injustice in all its forms, and
that a magistrate divided between a sense of obligations received and
the care of the public interest, which he ought always to promote, is
a paralytic magistrate, a magistrate deprived of a moiety of himself.
So spoke the preacher, while he portrayed a charity tender and prompt
for the wretched, a vehemence just and inflexible to the dishonest and
wicked, with a sweetness noble and beneficent for all; dwelling also
on his countenance, which had not that severe and sour austerity that
renders justice to the good only with regret, and to the guilty only
with anger; then on his pleasant and gracious address, his
intellectual and charming conversation, his ready and judicious
replies, his agreeable and intelligent silence, his refusals, which
were well received and obliging; while, amidst all the pomp and
splendor accompanying him, there shone in his eyes a certain air of
humanity and majesty, which secured for him, and for justice itself,
love as well as respect. His benefactions were constant. Not content
with giving only his own, he gave with a beautiful manner still more
rare. He could not abide beauty of intelligence without goodness of
soul, and he preferred always the poor, having for them not only
compassion but a sort of reverence. He knew that the way to take the
poison from riches was to make them tasted by those who had them not.
The sentiment of Christian charity for the poor, who were to him in
the place of children, was his last thought, as witness especially the
General Hospital endowed by him, and presented by the preacher as the
greatest and most illustrious work ever undertaken by charity the most
heroic.

Thus lived and died the splendid Pompone de Bellievre, with no other
children than his works. Celebrated at the time by a Funeral Panegyric
now forgotten, and placed among the Illustrious Men of France in a
work remembered only for its engraved portraits, his famous life
shrinks, in the voluminous _Biographie Universelle_ of Michaud, to
the seventh part of a single page, and in the later _Biographie
Generalle_ of Didot disappears entirely. History forgets to mention
him. But the lofty magistrate, ambassador, and benefactor, founder of
a great hospital, cannot be entirely lost from sight so long as his
portrait by Nanteuil holds a pl